The Post-racial President’s Profiling: DWW (Defending While White)

By Rachel Alexander, on August 4th, 2013

A black man who shot a white teenager, under circumstances much less defensible than Zimmerman’s, was acquitted.

What would it have taken for the jury that acquitted George Zimmerman to find him guilty? Well, try this on for size: imagine that instead of emerging from his encounter with Trayvon Martin bloodied with a broken nose, he didn’t have a scratch on him. Imagine he had also admitted he confronted Martin with gun drawn and hadn’t actually been attacked — but had shot Martin simply because the teen was running at him. Lastly, imagine Zimmerman was built like a brick outhouse, had trained in a few martial arts and even competed in martial-arts tournaments. Is it conceivable there could have been an acquittal?

Luckily for Zimmerman, the above was not his scenario. But those were the facts in the case of another man who shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old.

And there was an acquittal.

The case was however, different in two apparently significant ways: the teenager was white and the shooter was black.

The man’s name is Roderick Scott, and he shot teen Christopher Cervini in 2009 in Greece, New York. As with Zimmerman, Scott was aware there had been crimes in his neighborhood; unlike Zimmerman, Scott wasn’t a neighborhood-watch volunteer. But after observing some individuals preparing to break in to a neighbor’s vehicle on an April 4 night, Scott grabbed his handgun and walked outside “to stop or detain the criminals,” as he put it. He then saw someone rummaging around inside the vehicle and saw two suspects altogether, at which point he drew his weapon, chambered a round, took a shooting stance and ordered the teens to freeze, prompting one them to run off. But the other, Chris Cervini, charged toward him yelling that he was going to get him, claims Scott. Having already warned the criminals he was armed, Scott testified that he then shot the teen so he would not “kill me or hurt me.”

Other similarities between the two cases are that Scott was also faced with a manslaughter charged and was judged by a mostly white jury. But then there are some more differences. The national media didn’t pick up his story and make it a cause célèbre. We didn’t see news outlets plaster articles with a picture of a smiling, cherubic, pubescent Chris Cervini or NBC doctor a tape to provoke racial unrest and make Scott appear a bigot. We didn’t see the DOJ send operatives to NY to foment demonstrations, and Eric Holder never contemplated civil-rights charges against Scott. And no one said “It’s now legal to shoot white kids in America.”

Oh, yeah, and the best information has it that Cervini was not armed with a bag of Skittles.

It is also inconceivable that muscular martial-arts competitor Scott couldn’t have taken the teen down in mere seconds with his bare hands. But I suspect he was a no-nonsense type, that his attitude was, “If those punks make one wrong move, I’m gonna’ smoke ‘em.” But this is conjecture. Scott is a human being, deserves fair treatment, and I accept that reasonable doubt existed in his case. From a practical standpoint, however, that wasn’t the main reason why — unlike Zimmerman — his case proceeded without fanfare. It’s not the main reason he is not now a marked man.

It is that he wasn’t guilty of DWW.

At least since the first high-profile Defending While White case — Bernhard Goetz’s in 1984 — it has been clear that liberals have it exactly backwards (as usual). They feel that whites get favored treatment after inter-racial confrontations, but the reality is that if there’s any gray at all when it’s black vs. white, the journalism runs yellow. The media can have that story they love: privileged white oppressor guns down helpless black babe-in-the-woods victim. And then it’s sort of how your sex can be whatever you want today. Hispanics become white, a teen thug becomes a child, a defender becomes an attacker and lies become truth.

One thing Martin’s defenders are right about, however, is that black kids just aren’t safe on the streets of America. After all, homicide is the leading cause of death among black teens. In fact, as liberal Juan Williams wrote last year citing DOJ statistics based on a 2005 analysis, “Almost one half of the nation’s murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation’s murders.” But then there’s something else the DOJ tells us.

Ninety-three percent of these black victims were killed by other blacks.

That doesn’t leave much left over for other races, so what percentage of black and white homicides involves whites killing blacks?

Three percent1.

Moreover, this includes justifiable homicides (defensive situations), and only a minority would be incidents in which an older white man kills a black teen. And very, very few of those would be considered murders. Yet Eric Holder’s DOJ now behaves as if this phenomenon is such an epidemic that federal power must be used to stamp it out.

Of course, if Holder truly cared about blacks and not just agendas, his focus would be on the true epidemic of blacks killing other blacks. And if he cared about truth, he would actually publicize the findings of a study conducted by his own DOJ in 2011. And here is a of them from Investor’s Business Daily:

[E]ven though black men between the ages of 14 and 24 make up only 1% of the U.S. population, they represent 27% of all the nation’s murderers.

…While blacks make up just 13% of the population, they’re responsible for more than half — 53% — of the country’s murders.

The 36-page study, which analyzed race-based crime data spanning three decades, found that whites were twice as likely to be murdered by blacks than the other way around….

Note that the DOJ included Hispanics in its “white” category. If only non-Hispanic whites are considered, however, the US murder rate is comparable to that of Western Europe (because of this demographic reality, the murder rates in New Hampshire, Vermont and Iowa are lower than Britain’s).

Conclusion? If you’re a prospective murder victim in America, the probability is good that your victimizer will be a black youth. This is why the DOJ study also tells us, “[N]early 40% of all justifiable homicides were blacks defending themselves against violent blacks (and that doesn’t include all the black cops killing black thugs),” writes IBD. And we don’t hear much about this. But what if you’re a white person who must defend himself against a violent black youth?

You may be charged with DWW.

Then the media can publish its baby pictures. It can talk about how you murdered a “child” as it murders your reputation and perhaps your chances for a fair trial. It can twist the truth. And it can state idiotic things, such as that your “injuries weren’t life-threatening,” as some said about Zimmerman (wait until you have life-threatening injuries before defending yourself and you may not be able to defend yourself).

And if you think DWW is problematic here, just look overseas to South Africa, where whites are sometimes imprisoned on trumped-up charges after defending themselves. Moreover, the nation’s ANC-led government started disarming the white population in 2010 and, wroteFrontpage Mag in March:

Thus, white farm families were forced to relinquish their last line of defense against the tens of thousands of criminal gangs roaming the countryside–armed with AK47s. [sic] and as Genocide Watch noted on its website last July one more step was taken as well. “The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons,” it reported. “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”

Speaking of which, Genocide Watch places the imperiled South African whites at stage six in the genocidal process.

Stage seven is extermination.

Much like what some plan for George Zimmerman, the DWW transgressor with a $10,000 New Black Panther bounty on his head.

1Data are from the FBI, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Justice (details)